My Child, Fallen Down
by SquareRootOf-1
Summary: A quick genocide story from Toriel's perspective which I felt inspired to write.


When Toriel made her daily rounds to the entrance to the Underground, she heard an unfamiliar sound: cackling.

 _Oh no._

Although she was growing old, Toriel ran to the chamber with all the strength she had in her body, eyes widening in horror when she beheld what was taking place there. A large yellow flower, shaking from side to side as it laughed maniacally, had its backside to her. It surrounded something small with an arsenal of white pellets that were getting closer and closer in. Admist all the chaos, Toriel caught a glimpse of the unmistakable shape of a human soul. The silhouette of a person behind it stood still, unflinching, unafraid.

"Stop!" she yelled, raising a hand to summon one of the first fireballs she'd had to use in decades. The flower only had time to twist around and gape at her in terror before she let her attack fly, striking the weed and knocking it a good distance away. Frazzled, it burrowed back into the ground.

Toriel turned in the other direction.

The human she saw on the flowerbed before her now couldn't be older than ten. They were dressed in a simple blue sweater, banded with two horizontal purple stripes, matched with dark blue shorts and a pair of brown shoes. Unremarkable clothing for a human their age, similar all the others. But one look at their face stirred something deep in her memory. Out of all the fallen, this one resembled the one she lost most closely, and she felt a pang of longing for the first human child she had raised.

They faced her with their features eerily smooth, a sunbeam coming from the hole in Mount Ebott high above softly illuminating where they stood surrounded by soft yellow petals. That was where they had fallen in, clearly. Had they jumped intentionally? Tripped on a vine and lost their balance? There was no way for Toriel to tell. But how the child got here didn't matter, anyhow. What mattered was that they were here, and the first being they had faced had just attempted to kill them.

Strangely, the human's expression betrayed no fear as they looked back at her. Almost as if they had been expecting her.

"Do not be afraid, child," Toriel told them gently, thinking they must, somewhere, harbor at least a shred of fear–what human wouldn't, after seeing a monster for the first time? But the child only nodded slightly without any change in their expression. _Go on,_ they seemed to tell her. There was something deeply disturbing about this gesture, but Toriel continued, swallowing her fear. What threat could this human possibly hold? They were innocent. A child.

Seeing that the human almost looked bored as she continued talking, Toriel frowned and extended her hand. "Then come, my child. Allow me to guide you through the catacombs."

As Toriel turned to take the human through the Ruins, she had the sudden, uncanny sense that all this had happened before.

 _How could that be,_ she asked herself, _when I have met this human only today?_

 _Impossible._

The Ruins were strangely silent when Toriel returned from running her errands, but she made nothing of it, thinking it was another sleepy day for its monster inhabitants. Dialling the number of the phone she had given the human, she raised her own phone to her ear. At the same time, someone on the other side of the courtyard looked up, seal-brown hair swinging back to reveal their familiar face. She immediately ran to them.

"How did you manage to get here, my child? Are you hurt?" Toriel fretted, searching the small human up and down their body for injuries. A frown of disbelief creased her brow. "Not a scratch, I see. Impressive."

A smudge of something on the human's sleeve caught Toriel's eye, and she bent over to look at it closer. White glitter, or…?

Before she had a chance to think about it farther, the child pulled away quickly, dusting off their sleeve against their shirt as they did so.

"I should not have left you alone so long," Toriel sighed, taking the child by their hand. "Come! This way."

Toriel did admit it unnerved her how the human looked over everything in her home as if they had already seen it before…

How there was no light of curiosity in their eyes and no twitch of movement in their limbs, as if they felt no need to explore…

Now that she thought back to it, every time she had seen this human, they had had a certain air of boredom about them, as if they did not care about what was happening around them.

 _They,_ Toriel thought, _are certainly a strange child._

"Toriel," the human called.

"Yes?" she replied, looking up from _72 Uses For Snails_ into their earnest face. "What is it, dear?"

"I want to go home."

"But this _is_ your home, my child," Toriel stammered.

"I mean the Surface. I want to leave the Ruins."

"Ah… how about a fascinating snail fact from this book I am reading? Did you know that snails–"

"I mean it, Toriel."

Shocked by the human's abruptness and the way they had interrupted her, still with that same bored expression on their face, Toriel looked at them over the rims of her glasses. "Stay here. I need to do something." She stood up and walked briskly towards the basement stairs, thoughts swirling in her head.

Not again. Not again. No no no no no.

Asgore would kill them.

Why was it always so hard for those humans to understand that Toriel was only trying to keep them safe?

Once she was in the purple hallway that led out of the Ruins, she began to hear the human's small, pattering footsteps behind her, and turned around with a sigh.

"You wish to know how to leave the Ruins, do you not? Ahead of us lies the end of the Ruins. A one-way exit–"

The human's stare silenced her instantly. She didn't like this. Not one bit. She kept walking, faster this time, but they just followed her at an even faster clip.

"Just go back to your room. Be a good child, and go upstairs."

 _Please,_ she begged internally. _I cannot lose another child._

They didn't stop tailing her.

"This is your final warning," Toriel snapped. She had always hated raising her voice when it came to talking to children, but she knew it had to be done. "Go. Back. To. Your. Room."

As she spoke, she strode into the final chamber of the Ruins, the final delta-rune-marked door looming high and proud before them. This was the gateway she would close forever–once that child listened and _went back upstairs._

The look in their eyes was seriously scaring her.

"Child? The way you are looking at me… it is as if you have seen a ghost. Do you know something I do not?"

As usual, they remained perfectly stoic.

"No. Impossible."

With that, Toriel summoned a fireball. "Now prove to me you are strong enough to survive."

* * *

They were.

* * *

"Do you really hate me that much?" Toriel choked out. The words caught in her throat and tore at her from the inside. The human gave no response but to stand back and watch her coldly with their knife at their side. Waiting for her to die so they could move on. With horror, she realized that knife had taken far more lives, opened far more wounds, than just hers. "You killed them all," she snarled. "Now I know who I was protecting by keeping you here. Not you… but _them."_

Froggit. Whimsun. Moldsmal. Migosp. Vegetoid. Loox. And now, all the monsters beyond that door. They would be next.

" _Them."_

The human blurred in her vision, becoming one of many fuzzy shapes against the magenta backdrop of the Ruins, fading, melting away as the world spun around her. The gash their deceptively nonlethal-looking knife had ripped in her chest continued to bleed, a ruby stain blotting out the image of the Delta Rune from her robe. Blood shed from the wound took her life force with it as it dripped from her body.

 _An angel who has seen the surface will return, and the Underground will go empty._

The human standing over her was replaced by a rosy-cheeked child in a green shirt, throwing their arms around Toriel. "I love you, Mommy!" they laughed, burying their face in her dress.

"I love you too…" Toriel murmured disorientedly. "Chara…"

Chara fell down dead, a single buttercup petal falling from the corner of their mouth.

"My child…"

Chara. Asriel. All the fallen children Toriel had ever taken in as her own. They appeared in front of her, ghostly shapes. Each of them cast into the dark, thrust from her warm arms into the icy clutches of death. Now she would join them.

She let her eyes close, knowing she would never open them again.

With the last of her consciousness, Toriel wondered.

 _What have I done to end up as this human's murder victim, when all I ever wanted was just to be their mother?_


End file.
